LYNX-DEV Re: Lack of timeout

[afn06760]

>     * From: Wayne Buttles <address@hidden>
>     * Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 08:15:45 -0500 (EST)

>I have been using lynx as a web checker now for about a year and it works
>pretty good.  It makes it pretty easy to tell if a web server is
>completely unavailable.  There is one circumstance, however, that this
>fails on and I would like to figure out how to get around it.
>
>Sometimes one of my web servers will freak out and it will accept
>connections but never respond with data.  This locks lynx up waiting for
>something to happen, and it will stay this way until the process is
>killed.  I have seen one hung for 6 hours before.
>
>What can I do to make lynx time out automatically?

I thought part of the answer to this was doing the NSL_FORK bit.

So, I did that with lynx.exe on Windows 95, and wouldn't you know
it, the next day, my ISP decided to make nameserver lookups super
fast and http connections super slow?  Is that perverse of ibm.net
or what?

Actually, in order to keep up with all the other web browsers,
lynx needs an overall NSL_FORK mechanism that allows you to stop
a connection process anywhere along the way, not just at the name-
server.